Systems for use in field data collection, at diverse locations, to determine radio/TV audience listening behavior, or other audience preferences such as survey/questionnaire responses, the movement or status of bar-coded items in Production, purchase, or other market transactions, or to convert manually completed questionnaires to computer-readable form are well known in the art, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,355,372 and 4,603,232, by way of example. For example, prior art attempts at monitoring audience response to radio or television programming have included continuous live monitoring of broadcasts looking for real time matches on the fly of data, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,630,366, and the digitized storage of selected program segments for subsequent audio match, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,499,601, 4,450,531, and 4,511,917. In addition prior art electronic polling or audience survey systems are well known in the art, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,725,603; 3,587,077; 4,566,030; 4,377,870; 4,216,497; and 4,290,141; and British Pat. No. 1,536,414. However, none of these prior art systems discloses a system or method for discrete synchronized sample monitoring and storage of ambient sounds at a plurality of diverse locations which are analyzed against a remote synchronized master recording and used to provide an audience survey, nor does such prior art disclose a system in which audio information corresponding to bar code data may also be stored at the diverse locations, such as UPC type data by way of example, for providing supplemental market survey data of other audience preferences to the central location.
In most prior art cases known to applicants, each specific data collection need has resulted in specialized hardware and systems. For example, patterns of responses have been manually entered on survey response paper questionnaires by blackening pre-designated response areas, depending on the desired answer to a survey question. These paper forms are then "read" by specialized optical mark reading equipment (OMR) in which an array of photo cells detect, in a binary fashion, the presence or absence of response marks. The binary Pattern output is then processed by a digital computer. The optical mark reading equipment is specialized to such a degree that while it capably reads such marks, it is practically useless, for example, for reading bar codes. Similarly, existing equipment for reading bar codes is generally not practical for reading optical mark sheets. Nevertheless, it usually is desirable to collect multiple types of information, for example in market research, in a single setting. This is because the variety of types of information, (bar code, alpha-numeric, verbal responses, images, etc.) are generally fundamentally related. In market research, for example a purchase transaction (characterized by numbers for quantity and outlet) is related to the product (characterized by a bar code) and a perceived need or product opinion (as revealed by answers to survey questions) and is influenced by advertising (as heard in an audio/visual format over radio or TV). The market research industry, as well as numerous other industries including manufacturing and distribution, have a great need for single source data, but the unified collection of such data, using systems described in the prior art, is not economically feasible due to the specialization, diversity and incompatibility of the data collection systems involved. The recombining and correlating of such diversely gathered data for subsequent analysis is time consuming and error prone, and when it can be done at all, results, ultimately, in a social cost through higher consumer prices or less efficient market decisions. The specialization of data collection, recording and transmission approaches is the result of incompatible data formats and transmission protocols that have become ingrained.
The specialization noted above has perhaps been best typified in bar-code reading systems. Miniaturization of microcomputers and solid state memories has resulted in powerful hand-held microcomputerized bar-code readers and data collection instruments which decode the bar-code immediately upon scanning, verify it by means of the normally included check digit, and store the resulting numeric data in a solid state memory in traditional binary codes. In applications where relatively few such hand-held computers are needed, for example in inventory control, they have been reasonably practical and cost-effective. However, they are still complex and relatively expensive, even with existing large scale integrated circuits.
Moreover, these systems generally translate the digitally stored data into special tones for telephone transmission. Then, at the receiving end, the tones must be reconverted back to a digital format. This process of "modulation" and "demodulation" requires complex and expensive hardware, termed "modems", to carry out the transmission process.
Thus, the prior art systems known to applicant have not proven to be both efficient and cost effective. These disadvantages of the prior art are overcome by the present invention.